Brian the Blogger!

A few days ago, my girls and I sat together in the living room and watched It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown .  I have seen this charming special countless times over the years and have enjoyed it immensely.  There was something special about this viewing that I wanted to talk about in this blog. Peanuts was the brainchild of Charles Schultz, who had first created Peanuts as a comic strip in 1950 and it ran daily until 2000.  Schultz was contacted about making his Peanuts Gang into several holiday specials through the years.  It's The Great Pumpkin , A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving , and A Charlie Brown Christmas are Hoff Family favorites. Anyone who knows me knows immediately knows that I connect to music.  (see my last two blogs)  In the recent years, I have paid more attention to the music in background.  Scored, crafted, and performed by Vince Guaraldi.  He is the one who wrote the Peanuts Theme entitled Linus and Lucy and that ...

                            Sometimes, people play with love, falling in love is just a game..... Picture this:  1984.  Girl bands and groups on the radio were nothing new.  Madonna, The Pointer Sisters, the Bangles, and Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam were just a smattering of female artists that ruled the airwaves with their unique hits.  However, 1984 was the year that introduced a new style of music called Freestyle (a singable chorus, drum machines, and keyboard solos),  and it was performed by a group of three ladies calling themselves Expose'.  This hot new female band consisted of an eclectic mix of women:  Ann Curless, Gioia Bruno (pronounced Joy-a) and Jeanette Jurado.  These women went on to define an era of dance music and set records in the music industry that are tough to beat even today.  This blog will focus on the singles released from their smash, Lat...

If you were growing up in the 70's and 80's, and listening to the radio, the Pointer Sisters were ubiquitous; their songs saturated the airwaves.  There was not a time that I didn't enjoy one of their many hits, and this blog will focus on the singles of  their Triple Platinum album Break out . When the Pointers were recording songs for what would become Break Out , they were already stars in their own right.  They had a Grammy to their name for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for a song that they wrote called Fairytale .  They had amassed several gold singles and gold albums, and they had a massive hits in the early 80's with songs like He's So Shy and Slow Hand . The album, prior to Break Out,  was entitled So Excited.   The first single off the album was the snoozer American Music , which charted in the Pop Top Twenty.  The song's sluggish performance  affected the second single that was released enti...

Hey Everyone!  I wanted to do a blog on another board game that I played many time during my childhood.  First of all, I can clearly remember getting this game for a gift on my birthday many ( and I mean many) moons ago.   It was 1978 and I was the tender age of 7.  Star Wars was a huge blockbuster the year before and the marketing of this now classic film was in full swing:  action figures, clothes, a motion picture soundtrack, and various other items that helped to push this film into the American consciousness at the time.  To capitalize on the board game craze, Kenner, the company that produced many of the action figures and other toys in the Star Wars line, produced a board game in October 1977: Star Wars-Escape from the Death Star game. The game is set in the latter half of the Star Wars film.  The object was simple:  You had to move your Han Solo and Chewbacca token, along with your Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa tokens ...

"Be the hero of your story 'til it's done.  Why go promenade when you were born to run? Epiphany Lutheran Church presents their annual summer musical and this year, it was Big Fish .  If you never heard of the show, then here is a brief summation:  Traveling salesman Edward Bloom is known for regaling his tall tales, which delight his wife Sandra and his daughter-in-law Josephine, but aggravate his son,  Will.  Now that Edward is dying from cancer and Josephine is pregnant,  Will decides to get the truth behind his Dad's stories once and for all.  What Will discovers is that Edward has been trying to inspire him, and that his Dad really does love him.  I was involved with Epiphany's shows from the beginning, when I was in the pit orchestra for The Sound of Music .  I then landed the role of Mendel the Rabbi's son in Fiddler on the Roof .  I had taken a long break from these shows, I  returned in 2006, to perform in ...